A.

SLEEP­ING IN: We all do it when it’s cold and dark but a morn­ing lie-in is the first habit to crack. Now, when your alarm goes off, keep your brain switched off. Don’t start ne­go­ti­at­ing and telling your­self ‘Oh, if I don’t train this morn­ing, I’ll do it tonight.’ Don’t even think. Just get out of bed in robot mode. I think that’s one of the best habits you can get in to.

AL­CO­HOL IN­TAKE: If you’re one of those peo­ple who doesn’t drink dur­ing the week but has a few drinks on the week­end, that’s fine – but can you rein that in at all? When peo­ple have a few drinks they also tend to eat more, and their healthy habits of­ten go out the win­dow.

So when all your friends are out eat­ing and drink­ing on a Satur­day night, of­fer to be the des­ig­nated driver – that way the choice is taken away from you. Or sug­gest that in­stead of go­ing for drinks on a Fri­day, you meet your friends on Satur­day morn­ing for a walk and a cof­fee in­stead. It’s all about for­ward think­ing. You’re not tak­ing your­self out of the so­cial scene, you’re just in­ject­ing your­self into it in a dif­fer­ent way.

LONG-TERM HEALTH: Get out of the sea­sonal headspace. If you want to look af­ter your­self in all ar­eas – your health, men­tal well­be­ing, fit­ness – this isn’t some­thing you do for a pe­riod of time, it has to be some­thing that’s part of your reg­u­lar way of life.

It’s a more holis­tic way of look­ing at things. You might book a den­tist ap­point­ment to get your teeth checked for health, sign up for a course to keep your brain ac­tive for men­tal well­be­ing and com­mit to a reg­u­lar Pi­lates class for fit­ness. It’s not just about ‘I have to lose weight for this’ or ‘I’ve got to train my butt off’. It’s a dif­fer­ent mind­set.

We all know how im­por­tant it is to have our car ser­viced, so think of look­ing af­ter your body in the same way and do reg­u­lar main­te­nance checks. It makes ab­so­lutely no sense to me that peo­ple will trash their body but then put all that ef­fort into their car. I mean, how many cars will you have over your life­time... three, four? You only have one body – this is it.